But I'm getting ahead of myself. The DiggBar is a new feature that adds lots of great features to pages and sites linked on Digg. And to do so, it shortens the URL (to one starting with http://digg.com/) and loads the target in a frame.

In a frame?! I thought we were done with frames half a decade ago.

There are myriad reasons why this is a bad thing, and not all of them involve Digg stealing revenue, and other sites have covered it better, but in short, it's a bad thing.

So, how can you avoid it framing your Habari site?

DiggBar Blocker

Unzip that in your /user/plugins/ directory, and activate it in your admin plugins page.

By default, it will provide a brief message ("This site does not support use of the DiggBar.") and a link to the correct page with your URL on it. I also added an option to bypass the nice message, and just reload the target outside of the bar.

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, please leave them below or submit a ticket on the Habari-extras Trac.

14 May 2008

November's still five three months away, but I'm thinking ahead. I've written two simple plugins for Habari that will let me easily see how many words I've written* toward the 50,000 word goal of National Novel Writing Month. These plugins provide a quick and easy tally of words used in individual posts and all posts with a given tag.

Requirements

version 0.5 of Habari or later

Download

Installation and use

Word Count by Tag

Unzip wordcountbytag.zip in /user/plugins. Then activate and configure it in the Plugins Admin page. If you leave the 'tags to include' box empty it will count all words from published posts with all tags. The words in the posts' titles can optionally be added to the total.

Here how to add it to your theme (no need to echo):

$theme->word_count;

Post Word Count

Unzip postwordcount.zip in /user/plugins. Then activate it in the Plugins Admin page. It will count all of the words from the post, and the words in the post's title can optionally be added to the total.

Here is the template tag for adding to your theme, inside the posts loop:

echo $post->word_count;

Comments and questions should be left below. Subsequent updates and releases will likely appear on the plugin page, not here.

* Or rather, how far behind I am, if my typical progress from the last several years progress is any indication.

13 May 2008

I've written a simple plugin for Habari to add geographical information to a blog. I've used geotags for years* with websites like GeoURL by manually-editing my page headers, but this geotags plugin automatically inserts the correct tags in every generated header.

Requirements

Using version 0.5 of Habari or later, all you need is this line somewhere in the <head> block of your theme.

$theme->header();

If you are using one of Habari's default themes, then you are already set.

12 May 2008

I've removed the calendar from the top corner of this site. It's not because of all of the days (then weeks, then months) that passed without any new updates*. No, I've changed the software platform on which this is built yet again. I've been able to keep most of the look and feel the same, though no small effort of breaking and fixing the existing code both for the presentation (colors and graphics, etc) as well as actual bits of the software that I needed.

I'm now running Habari, an open-source blogging platform built from the ground up (not adapted or ported or forked like many of its predecessors) to be better. It's not a finished product by any stretch, but it's more than functional enough for me now, and, what's better, it's being actively developed by an accessible dev team. They already know me by name for all of my questions, suggestions, and bug reports, and soon I'll be contributing a plugin or two myself.

I was tempted to work backward, backdate some posts, and claim that database issues kept a few of the more recent updates (that is, anything after January) from showing up, but I'm going to be honest and just admit that I haven't been writing anything here.

So what's happened in the last four months? I left a contract position to work full-time for the State of Ohio as a Business Analyst. At least, that's my title - I'm still a ways from knowing exactly what that really means. I stay busy, though, and I like the people. I really like working in downtown Columbus - it's a big difference, now being able to eat lunch looking out from over thirty stories up, from the windowless cement bunker where previously I'd spent my meals. Being able to get out and still the city is also quite nice, and I've procured an inexpensive, pocket-size camera with which I've taken a few pictures around town. The good ones I've posted to Flickr. In fact, I've taken quite a few pictures recently, and I've been attempting to take at least one picture every day and post it.

Photos aren't the only things I've posted online. I've also been active with a so-called 'microblog' on Twitter, which is great for small updates, random questions, brief conversations, and a whole bunch of things I don't know how to do yet, or that need more people I know to be signed up to be useful. At some point I intend to better mesh those updates with the longer posts I put here, but until then you can find my most recent update here on this page in the upper right corner.

So now that I'm done fixing most of what was broken on the back-end, will I get back into the business of posting new stuff? Difficult to say. Right away I'm going to have a couple posts about some Habari plugins, and then after that, who knows?

* Well, not entirely at least. But it was a bit, well, disheartening to load the page and see that blank calendar all the time. Not disheartening enough to get me to load up the editor and write new stuff, of course, but pretty close.